Our new blog today from our research fellow Stephen Ball looks at a proposal in 1848 to hold parliamentary sessions in Dublin: https://t.co/D5wWe4nbCW
— TheVictorianCommons (@TheVictCommons) April 27, 2022
This morning.
Via The Victorian Commons:
…The idea was that each year Parliament would meet in Dublin for a session devoted entirely to Irish business. This had been suggested in June 1835 by the Leominster MP Thomas Bish, who moved to address the king on the subject, although his initiative attracted so little interest that the Commons was counted out before it could proceed further.
By mid-1848, however, Ireland had suffered an unprecedented famine and witnessed an abortive rising by the Young Ireland movement. In the wake of these events ways were sought to make Parliament more responsive to Ireland’s plight….
…The Society for the Promotion of Periodical Sittings of the Imperial Parliament in Dublin argued that holding an annual parliamentary session in Dublin would encourage the capital investment required to develop the country’s natural resources and stimulate trade, and might also coax the ‘wealthy and educated’ back to Dublin, which was then regarded as a ‘city of desolate palaces … without an aristocracy, and tenanted by struggling shopkeepers and half-famished artizans’.
No change there then.
Fight!
Sounds like Dublin was a bit of a hole then &, after a period in the 90’s, the 1990s that is, when it looked for a while like it would begin again to look like the second city of the Empire, it’s all returned to crap.
Outside the building that would’ve housed those sittings, the complex bike & bus lane set-up has banished cars but festooned the road with plastic sticks, basically, sticking out of the ground, seperating the buses from the cyclists, who always seem like the type who didn’t cycle as kids & are never going to be safe road-goers, having missed the boat, as it were.
The final insult is the replacement of the cricket-pitch perfection of the grass outside Trinity’s front gate with a trendy, wild meadow set-up, a good idea in the wrong location, it looks dreadful.